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The Seafarer
Alliteration is the repetition of a consonant sound within a line of poetry. Alliteration, when used in Anglo-Saxon poetry, was used to insure the musical quality of the lyrical and elegiac poems....
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The Seafarer
These three Anglo Saxon works represent the beauty of Old English literature. Each of these works is a poem--specifically an elegy. An elegy is a lament--an expression of sorrow over a loss or...
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The Seafarer
In the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Seafarer," the narrator shares the pitiless battering of nature on his person and his difficulty in being separated from the company of other people. Ironically, being...
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The Seafarer
The narrator explains the relationship between the man and the sea as the experience of life itself. The sea, like life, is a dangerous and unpredictable place. It is ice-cold, full of storms and...
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The Seafarer
My first impression of the speaker in the Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Seafarer", is that this person leads a lonely and isolated life on the sea. His job is very cruel and very hard work. The seafarer...
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The Seafarer
Alliteration means the repetition of an initial sound in two or more words of a phrase, line, or sentence. It is usually a consonant and marks the stressed syllables in a line of poetry or prose....
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The Seafarer
For the Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Seafarer," some, but not all, of the characteristics of elegy are present. Here are those elegiac characteristics: There is a melancholic, mournful tone to the poem...
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The Seafarer
The use of imagery within a text allows a reader to create mental images based upon the descriptions offered by the author. Well written imagery appeals to the senses of the reader and offers...
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The Seafarer
In "The Seafarer," the speaker talks about the realities of life as a seafarer on the ocean and the excitement, danger, beauty, and suffering that accompanies such a life. Within this description...
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The Seafarer
"The Seafarer" is an Anglo-Saxon elegiac poem. As with many Anglo-Saxon texts, the poem contains caesuras, kennings, assonance, and alliteration. Caesura is a sound break in the middle of a line....
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The Seafarer
"The Seafarer" is an elegy in the Anglo-Saxon tradition and focuses mainly on the theme of exile. Its protagonist, the seafarer himself, speaks of having been "fettered" by the cold of the sea when...
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The Seafarer
The second part of "The Seafarer" contains many references to the speaker's relationship with god. God is an entity to be feared. He is the Creator: He turns the earth, He set it swinging firmly...
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The Seafarer
The three things that the Seafarer most fears from Fate are:"illness, or age, or an enemy's Sword, snatching life from his soul." (ll 70-71)In other words, the three things that men die...
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The Seafarer
The speaker tells us that no one is sure which way he will die--either by sickness, old age, or by an enemy's hand. An ungodly liife on earth is restricted to earth, but a life lived in godly...
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The Seafarer
This is an excellent question. The seafarer isn't quite like other Anglo-Saxon literature like Beowulf where there is a definite king and a warrior willing to give his life to protect the king....
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The Seafarer
Starting at the beginning of the poem, the seafarer is melancholy to the point of being profoundly depressed. He is depressed because he is stuck in a life on the ocean. He even refers to it as a...
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The Seafarer
“The Seafarer” is an Anglo-Saxon poem that was passed on orally and then written in Old English, most likely by monks during the first millennium. The poem is generally considered to be a...
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The Seafarer
"The Seafarer" is an Anglo-Saxon poem which was probably originally sung by scops, like most of the other literature of the period. It has been translated many ways, so an examination of several...
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The Seafarer
In "The Seafarer," loneliness and alienation are themes referred to often by the poem's speaker. The seafarer describes loneliness on the water in the following quote using imagery that describes...
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The Seafarer
The "Seafarer" is an Anglo Saxon elegy that begins with a concrete description of the sea and ends with abstractions about the past, faith, and rules of conduct. The beginning of the poem is...
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The Seafarer
This is a trick question because one could make a "correct" argument for any of the three possibilities. In my opinion, however, the best answer to your question is that the speaker of "The...
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The Seafarer
Alliteration was one of the key elements used by Old English poets. Unlike many of today's poets, and especially today's students, Old English poets didn't worry too much about end-rhyme. Poets...
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The Seafarer
The seafarer clearly thinks that life at sea is more difficult than life on land. The first part of the poem illustrates this in detail. Life at sea is defined in terms of coldness and loneliness....
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The Seafarer
Even though the seafarer spends the first part of the poem explaining how awful, lonely, and cold sea life is, he then says that he keeps going back to it voluntarily. The time for journeys would...
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The Seafarer
The speaker does not exactly say that he feels fear when the sails unfurl. He does say that there is no man who is so brave as not to feal fear when the sails unfurl. What he is saying here is...
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The Seafarer
This an interesting question, because the poem alludes to two different cultural conceptions of heroism -- the early, pre-Christian, Germanic conception, and the Christian one. The seafarer himself...
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The Seafarer
"The Seafarer," a poem that speaks to us down the centuries about suffering, loss, and hope for an everlasting life, is found in what is known as the Exeter Book and was most likely composed in the...
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The Seafarer
The narrator relates the fear he experiences, being at the mercy of the elements, in lines 6-8, "Of smashing surf...Of an anxious watch, perched in the bow as it dashed under cliffs". He...
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The Seafarer
Elegies can be laments for the dead. They can also be self-reflective poems. This is the case of "The Seafarer." Elegies are most notably mournful and melancholy. Although elegies were initially...
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The Seafarer
The speaker catalogues the qualities that might earn a person a place in heaven at the end of the poem, in lines 108-116. He highlights the virtues of humility, courage, faith, chastity and love,...
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The Seafarer
Loneliness is a key theme in the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Wayfarer". The narrator introduces the idea of his isolation this way: I have spent great careworn wintersan exile on the ice-cold sea,cut...
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The Seafarer
“The Seafarer” is an Old English poem by an anonymous poet. The speaker in the poem tells of the difficulties of being adrift in the sea, then compares it to the relatively easy life of the city...
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The Seafarer
"The Seafarer" describes the physical and emotional struggles of being out at sea. The speaker describes having to endure the loneliness of sea-travel as well as the difficult winter weather. He...
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The Seafarer
The Seafarer and The Wanderer, two of the most well-known and studied Old English poems, were most likely composed around 750 CE, roughly contemporaneous with Beowulf. Like Beowulf, these two...
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The Seafarer
The speaker mourns the loss of great leaders and rich empires. He laments the fact that the world is losing its "Golden Age" of heroes. It is the passage from a warrior-based society to a Christian...
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The Seafarer
The predominant mood is one of suffering and discomfort. He has endured many hard winters on the cold seas. The Seafarer speaks of the "frozen chains" and "icy bands" that...
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The Seafarer
The Old English poems “The Wanderer,” “The Seafarer,” and “Dream of the Rood” all contain strong religious themes, but they express these themes in different ways. The most overtly religious of the...
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The Seafarer
The speaker describes the word in his time as rough, and imagines that things were wonderful before. The Sea-farer is drawn to the sea, even though it’s a rough life. He makes many comparisons,...
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The Seafarer
"The Seafarer" is an Anglo-Saxon poem about a man who lives his life on the sea, a seafarer. The poem is one hundred and twenty-four lines long, and most of the first half of the work is a...
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The Seafarer
The poem is divided into two parts with two definitely opposite attitudes. The first part is describing the pain and suffering a sailor goes through living on the sea. It's "icy bands"...
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The Seafarer
In the opening line and on through the first twenty, the speaker of this poem is miserable. He describes his experience at sea as being in constant "sorrow and fear and pain" (line 3), "suffering...
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The Seafarer
The short answer is that the poem presents two contrasting conceptions of glory or fame. One is connected with the heroic values of pre-Christian, Germanic culture, and concerns one's reputation...
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The Seafarer
In lines 108-110 the author says,"Death leaps at the fools who forget their GodHe who lives humbly has angels from Heaven To carry him courage and strength and belief".The author believes...
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The Seafarer
"The Seafarer" is an Anglo-Saxon poem which is narrated by a seafaring man who tries to explain why why he loves the sea despite the horrible hardships he has to endure there. The opening lines of...
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The Seafarer
Concerning "The Seafarer," Christianity came to what we now call Great Britain in the sixth century A.D, brought by missionaries from continental Europe, for the most part. Celtic and Anglo-Saxon...
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The Seafarer
The speaker of the poem longs for the sea...it is his heart, his soul, his very being. No matter how much he may want to settle down and enjoy the warm comforts of land, food, drink, and female...
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The Seafarer
"The Seafarer", like most Anglo-Saxon or Old English poetry (including Beowulf) is written in what is known as strong-stress or alliterative meter. Unlike modern English poetry, in which feet are...
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The Seafarer
The poem The Seafarer is a lonely account of a man sailing by himself, so naturally, isolation features heavily in this work. We can intuit at the beginning of the poem that the sailor has no crew,...
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The Seafarer
Decide on three or four aspects that you could compare and contrast. For example, the use of Christian elements and Pagan elements, the speaker, and the reason for a nomadic lifestyle. Both poems...
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The Seafarer
To me, the contrast that is implied is a contrast between the old, pagan, heroic values of the days gone by and the new, more Christian and peaceful values that the poet is recommending to people....
